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Problem with a CS8900 NIC on a MIPS-Board

Hi all,

i'm running in trouble with the above mentioned Ethernet-Chip at an embedded Toshiba-MIPS-Board (Phoenix). This Board is running PMON as Bootloader, and with PMON the ethernet-chip is working fine. So we can download tons of software through this NIC and it is running smoothly.

But in Linux it doesnt. We try to run MontaVista 4.01 (kernel 2.6.x) on it, the NIC will be recognized, but it doesnt work. It even doesnt give a proper error message, all we get is a "eth0 isnt configured". If i do some config by hand with ifconfig, it just doesnt work. The only noticable thing is that ifconfig doesnt show the MAC of the NIC, omly 00:00:00:00:00:00. Is there anybody with similar experience with these NIC and maybe a solution or just a hint?

Thanks, Jens

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Jens Nixdorf
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Hi Jens,

The information regarding etc. MAC address is normally handled by the bootloader which also seams to be the case here. When the bootloader handles over the control to the kernel is can also hand over a pointer to a board information structure which contains information like MAC and other borad specific information. As var as i remeber it is not required and can often be disabled in the bootloader at compile time.

I would take a look at the bootloader to se if the information is passed on. This is handled differently for every processor so I would also take a look at the processor specific start code in the kernel arch/[processor type]/kernel/*

Mogens Jens Nixdorf skrev:

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Reply to
Winther

Winther schrubte am Dienstag, 25. Juli 2006 10:31:

Thank you for your answer and sorry for the delay with my response. In my case the problem was that the NIC has to work in 8bit-mode (this is a limitation of the board we use). But in 8bit-mode the default driver of this NIC (cs8900) is working in a very limited way. As an example it can only work in polling mode.

Fortunately there is an alternative driver (cyrrus), which is working much better after some reworking on it, which has be done by some guys of pengutronix (thanks!).

regards, Jens

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